"And, of course, you really dig sex, right? I mean, all those Johns, out-of-town businessmen, fat politicians, and greasy Daddy Warbucks types, it must be great making it with them, huh?"
That made her belligerent. "What the hell kind of a nut are you, anyway? You come in here to get laid, flop on the bed without even taking off your shoes, and start asking me all these questions that are none of your goddamn business. Now do you want to or not? I have other clients waiting."
The madder Terry became, the more I liked her. I laughed and pulled on her hand. "Come lie with me, baby. I'm gonna tell you a story you'll never forget."
I told her about hustling queers, about knowing every whore in town and about those whom I had lived with, and what eventually happened to most of them. Fascinated, she put her arms around me and pulled close, like a little girl getting a bedtime story from her father.
Every five minutes the door would pound, and Jack, who was next in line for Terry, would yell, "Hey, -what're you cats doin' in there? F'Chrissake, hurry up."
And Terry and I would yell, "Not yet, still busy!"
I told her about the whores' pecking order and how a big percentage of them end up on drugs or sauce, walking the streets. Then I asked her, "I bet you're going to just stay in a couple of years, till you can save enough to open a dress shop of your own, or make a killing in the blue chips, right?"
Terry gasped. "How did you know that? Did Rita tell you?"
I had to explain that she was suffering from the same useless dream that tens of thousands of broken-down old whores all over the country had dreamed at one time or another, that her chances of ever seeing it come true were practically zilch because The Life got to you after a while. The money you made just seemed to disappear and somehow it was always "next year" that you were going to do it, until it was too late. I told her to look at Rita carefully, because she was about ready to slip down the ladder to the- bars. Terry, amazed again, said that sometimes when things were slow for Rita she did go to some of the better bars to work.
Jack banged on the door again.
"Goddamnit," I yelled, "keep the hell away until we come out."
I heard some drunken grumbling as he faded down the hall.
There was a wetness on my shirt -and when I looted down I saw that Terry was crying silently. I held her closer and stroked her hair. She was so little and cute, cuddled into me. I wanted her; not as a whore, but as my woman. I wanted to live with her and take care of her because I had just uncovered somewhere within me, a fatherly bent to which Terry appealed. I didn't want a cat or a dog; I wanted Terry for a pet, and the idea that I knew I could drag her out of The Life appealed to my ego.
"Our lives 'Sometimes take strange twists, and yours
She looked up at me. "What do you mean?" took one today, honey."
"I mean you're through, finished. Your big two weeks as a call girl are over and you're all washed up, unless you're looking forward to those plastered slobs out there bouncing all over your belly and puking on you."
"What am I going to do?" She tried to dry her eyes on my shirtsleeve.
I put my hand under her chin and lifted her face slowly to mine. "You're coming home with me, right now," I said firmly. "That is, if you want to. I've got a real nice apartment, and we're going to find you a decent job with a decent salary, and you're going to stay with me as long as you want to, no strings attached. You take the bedroom and I'll take the couch. What do you say?"
Terry looked into my eyes long and hard for hidden motives, chicanery, perfidy. Finally she nodded her head up and down slowly and got up to get dressed. "God! And to think that when you walked in here I thought you were a bashful cutie who had never been with a girl before. I thought I'd have to coax you to get undressed, and now here I am going home with you and changing my whole life and I'm not even sure why."
"Don't worry," I said. "You would have made a lousy whore, anyway. Some girls just aren't cut out for it, and you're one of them!"
She got her purse, put sixty dollars on the bed, and gave me back my twenty.
The pounding on the door started again and a jumble of drunken voices began shouting. I could hear Rita over all of them, demanding that Terry come out. But as drunk and as mad as they were, nobody opened the unlocked door until, holding Terry's arm, I threw it open from the inside.
"What the hell were you two doing all that time?" Jack yelled. You couldn't have been screwing that long."
"Fer Chrissake, we'll be stuck here all day if you don't hurry with them." Rita whined.
"Rita old girl, Terry just turned in her trick towel and quit, she's going home with me," I said.
This brought pandemonium. The guys who were waiting for Terry started moaning about their money, and Rita screamed obscenities at me. I told the fellas they'd find their dough on the bed, and if they wanted to give it to Rita instead, that was their business. I told Rita to go fuck herself, grabbed Terry by the hand, and left them all standing there in shock.
We drove right to the flat on outer Washington Street that Terry rented with Rita and two other girls, got her stuff while nobody was home, and went to my place.
She loved it. Dropping an armful of clothes and a cosmetics case, she danced about, laughing and touching everything, like a puppy in a new garden. She swore she had never seen such a super apartment and asked if she could cook me dinner now. Was I hungry? Did I want anything? Could she do anything for me? For the first time she felt free, and I felt it with her because I had been there once myself.
I put on music and made drinks and she fixed spaghetti, a huge salad, and garlic French bread for dinner. And we talked. Her parents lived in Belmont, on the peninsula, and were divorced. Her father used to beat her regularly, accusing her in his heavy Greek accent of whoring with boys, when she really wasn't. But then she started to, just as a means of getting back at him, figuring that if she was going to be damned as a sinner, she might just as well sin. There was never any enjoyment out of it, except thinking to herself that she wished her father could see her with Charlie's prick in her hand, or Joe fucking her, or jacking Bill off all over the seat of his car. However, her father never did see her, so her revenge was only symbolic, and she would come home and try to soak off her guilt in the bathtub.
By the time her parents were divorced she was seventeen. She lived with her mother, who spent every evening out cruising the bars looking for a new husband. Many nights her mother never came home. After Terry was graduated from high school and turned eighteen she left home and went to San Mateo Junior College for two years, and also to secretarial school, where she learned to type eighty words a minute and take dictation. But when she came up to the city to find work there was nothing available, so, rather than return home, she took a job as hostess in a restaurant, making barely enough to pay the rent on a dumpy basement apartment in North Beach.
Rita came in for late-night snacks when she had dates along Motel Row on O'Farrell Street or nearby Van Ness Avenue, and Terry got to know her pretty well. Early mornings were slow, so Terry would pour herself a cup of coffee and sit with Rita, and the two of them would talk.
Finally, a few weeks later, Rita had made her the offer, using the chance to make big money as a come-on and painting mental pictures of the beautiful dress shop the two of them would one day buy. Terry, who spent her days looking fruitlessly for work as a secretary, spent another week thinking about job hunting and about Rita's offer. At the end of the week she decided that she would try being a call girl, at least for a while.
She moved into the flat with the other girls and took her first trick, or client, as the high-class girls call them, on the second night. The girls had a referral-only system, which isn't the best, but if the heat's on it's usually safe. One of the girls would service Henry S. If Henry was pleased, he would tell a visiting executive friend about it, and the friend would phone and say that Henry had referred him. The girls would get the friend's phone number, then tell the friend to have Henry phone to verify. When Henry phoned, they would ask him a question that only he could answer, and check it in the little black book that all call girls keep on their Johns, just to be sure it wasn't a setup by the cops. Then they would phone back the friend to arrange the date. If he just wanted to get laid, the rate was fifty dollars if he came to the flat or fifty plus cab fare both ways if he wanted the girl at his hotel. More often than not the trick wanted a real date for dinner, a show, and the whole evening, in which case the fee was a flat hundred, plus whatever he wanted to spend on her.